How to set up spooling for a HP JetDirect interface?

Ole Holm Nielsen Ole.H.Nielsen at fysik.dtu.dk
Thu May 6 06:57:58 GMT 1999


Regarding SAMBA printing problems to HP JetDirect:

We use HP printers with the JetDirect network card and 
they work very well.  However, the print spooler on Linux
(RPM lpr-0.35-0.5.2) as well as the one on AIX 4.2.1 have a
problem when the JetDirect card doesn't respond while it
is processing a job:  The AIX print queue hangs, whereas
we find that jobs are lost in the Linux spooler.  Try to
send two large print jobs from Linux to a remote JetDirect,
and you will probably find that the second job vanishes.

As a workaround, we send Linux print to a remote UNIX 
spooler that doesn't loose jobs.  On AIX we restart the
queue from crontab by this undocumented command (from
IBM support):  /usr/bin/qadm -U [queuename]
One UNIX spooler that doesn't have a problem with 
JetDirect's non-responsiveness is the one in an old
SunOS 4.1.3 machine.  I trust that HP-UX will work, too.

> Tulipant-Gergely at dbrt.hu:
> > I've set up Samba and LPRng for HP printers with
> > JetDirect cards. It works for one user at a
> > time. But if the printer is off-line or busy, the
> > samba client does not get an error message, but
> > the job gets lost. :( I would like the print
> > jobs to be spooled on Linux even when there is an
> > active print job or when the printer is off-line.
> > Unfortunately I'm not familiar with lpd.
> 
> Well. When remote printer server does not response,
> lpd spools message. I have not hear that jobs
> are lost althoug we have several  HP printers with
> JetDirect cards.

Ole Holm Nielsen
Department of Physics, Technical University of Denmark,
Building 307, DK-2800 Lyngby, Denmark


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